Month: October 2006

Google Docs, and Zoho

What was Writely is now Google Docs. Sigh. They’ve combined it with the spreadsheet package, so they are available from the same screen – the homepage being effectively a file manager when you log in.

One criticism of Google when they buy things is that they don’t bother to integrate them properly with everything else – think Blogger, and until recently, Picasa. But with Writely, sorry, Google Docs, they have got rid of the nice Writely green and orange look and the end result is just really dull. I suppose it means that Gmail, Calendar and the two productivity apps all now share the same interface.

In other news on the online productivity front, the Zoho suite of online productivity apps now only needs on sign-in per application. Before, if I used Writer, and then needed to go into Sheet, I would have to log in twice. No more. Good stuff.

The Games We Play

Spending a daft amount of time on my day off here. Nice flash versions of some classic arcade games, notably Space Invaders, Frogger and Asteriods.

The same chap who did the PacMan port which is on my personalised Google page.

Aggregating RSS with WordPress

I have been working away recently on a little project to bring together all of the RSS feeds of members of Palimpsest, the discussion forum I maintain. I have used third party arrangements, like KickRSS and Suprglu in the past, neither of which were wholly satisfactory. I’m a regular reader of the WordPress Planet – which pulls together influential WordPress based feeds – and one for the Anglian LUG. So I thought perhaps it would be best to host the aggregated feeds myself, using either the Python based Planet or the PHP MetaPlanet.

An hour’s fiddling last night made it clear that both were beyond my modest abilities. So, I needed another solution. I found it – a WordPress plug-in that aggregates feeds and spews out separate posts for each item. The title of each posts acts as a link back to the originating site. I soon had it up and running, and it seems to work really well for a quick-and-dirty solution. 

A great option for those wanting to create a blogging community.

Load more posts!